iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 22/06/2026

this all stopped being a “negotiation” a while ago. it’s a hostage situation and we are the hostages. “use our brain draining AI bot or be fired. pay $500+ per hard drive or get lost. by the way, we’re doubling your power bill so we can build more data centers and try to kill all jobs.”

Gamers Nexus: Were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops?
Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais: Look, there's no contracts. There's nothing.
Those guys... they give us a price every month or something and they say, 'you can buy that many,' and it's yes or no.
And if we say no, then they never talk to us again.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 17/06/2026

listening to the latest from @techwontsave.us and despite years of following the AI bubble at this point, this anecdote from a nurse about a major hallucination of their AI scribe completely stunned me. we have to resist and regulate, immediately. this cannot become the new norm.

So for instance, a nurse I was speaking with told me a story about a different AI scribe. I don't think it was a proprietary one of that report. But the problem was the same, which is that there was a gay man who was a gardener, who would come in and had a rash on his arm.

And the AI scribe that was doing the note taking, created a narrative about not the pine needles that had given this man a rash, but rather intravenous drug use and promiscuous sex. Because gay man Needle created an association and that created a report that was deeply offensive, right? Wrong and to some extent dangerous.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 15/06/2026

who cares if it’s overvalued!

Screenshot from the $SNDK board on Stocktwits.

Tellie15 13m
@the_conqueefador just be honest with me.
Have you made any money trading SNDK? Who cares if it's over valued. If ur making money that's all that matters

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 29/05/2026

back in January I had an SSD order on Amazon (which was already at an inflated price) canceled after a 3-week hold. I can only assume it went directly into a Claude code server somewhere.

Hello,

Due to a lack of availability, we will not be able to obtain the following item from your order. We've canceled the item and apologize for the inconvenience. If you see a charge for the canceled item, we will refund you within 1-2 business days. If you are still interested in purchasing this item, it may be available from other sellers. Please visit the detail page for this item below.

Western Digital 4TB WD Red SA500 NAS...
Sold by Amazon.com Services, Inc

Cancel Reason: Out of Stock

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 23/05/2026

finally picked a spot for this Frieren poster. art by @kehasuk.bsky.social

Frieren poster hanging in a dark brown wood frame on a white wall, under a recessed warm light in the ceiling. to the left you can see our staircase to the second floor, and a stuffed baby owl sitting on our bookshelf. at the bottom you see Luna the cat. at the exact moment I took this picture, she happened to be jumping off the step stool I used to hang this to go chase her brother Sol.

Frieren poster hanging in a dark brown wood frame on a white wall. art by Kehasuk. various elements from the series in flat shapes and bright colors, from a red dragon perched at the top of the scene above Frieren to half-portraits of her party running through the middle of the frame, and her master looking up at a meteor shower in the bottom third.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 08/05/2026

dug up this old Nintendo poster from the 90s when going through some very old totes a while back. finally got it framed and on the wall.

Nintendo poster from the 90s featuring Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World and Super Metroid. It’s hanging on a white wall in my office above two monitors showing a Mac lock screen with a Virginia mountain landscape as the background.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 30/03/2026

somehow, every time I drive past the sign it’s just more true. spoiled. #UCONN

Welcome to
• CONNECTICUT
Home of the
Basketball Capital of the World
Governor Ned Lamont

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 29/03/2026

have a Mario Kart 64 tiebreaker almost-live from #PAXEast 2026. Round of 16, our friend Yoshi + Toad were tied in the Flower Cup so this one Choco Mountain race decides who moves on to Top 8. maybe the craziest ending I’ve ever seen in decades of playing. unreal.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 07/03/2026

hadn't opened VSCode in months (yes, my software dev hiatus is that bad). first thing I'm greeted with is this screen. literally, all but one of these bullets from the latest patch notes are AI-focused features. uninstalled. probably time to move on from this career. was a fun 4 years.

Security update: The following extension has security updates: GitHub.copilot-chat.

Update 1.110.1: The update addresses these security issues in core and these security issues in the GitHub Copilot Chat extension.

Welcome to the February 2026 release of Visual Studio Code. This release makes agents practical for longer-running and more complex tasks, giving you more control and visibility, new ways to extend agents, and smarter session management.

Agent plugins: install prepackaged bundles of skills, tools, and hooks from the Extensions view

Agentic browser tools: let the agent drive the browser to interact with your app and verify its own changes

Session memory: persist plans and guidance across conversation turns

Context compaction: manually compact conversation history to free up context space

Fork a chat session: create a new, independent session that inherits conversation history to explore alternative approaches

Agent Debug panel: get real-time visibility into agent events, tool calls, and loaded customizations

Chat accessibility: use chat to its fullest with screen reader improvements, keyboard navigation, and notification signals

Create agent customizations from chat: generate prompts, skills, agents, and hooks directly from a conversation

Kitty graphics protocol: render high-fidelity images directly in the integrated terminal

Happy Coding!

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 22/02/2026

In my time between jobs I’ve been slowly working on a homelab, and today is the first day it finally became photo-worthy. Will get a full guide and hardware list up soon. Self-hosting a server is empowering. It really is possible to cut out a bunch of dependencies on big tech.

A 2ft tall, 10 inch wide black aluminum server tower from DeskPi. A few different mini PCs and network switches are all plugged into each other with various colors of cat 6 cables. You can also still see where I cut open our drywall in the background to run Ethernet through the wall down to the first floor.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 21/01/2026

just this interview excerpt alone should destroy all credibility as a tech CEO. you understand Grok well enough to say it’s the “best conversational model” for your preorder anime waifu, but somehow blew past all the Mecha-Hitler and deepfake news? who actually believes this?

Question: Is xAI a good partner when it comes to trust and safety?

Answer: Specifically, I don’t really like to comment on that at this point in time because I don’t have enough information, I think, right now. I really don’t. My focus to date has been more in terms of what’s the best conversational model that we’ve got, and they’re great, they’re fantastic.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 13/01/2026

NFL Divisional playoff weekend schedule.

NFL DIVISIONAL weekend schedule. Bills @ Broncos 430pm Saturday on CBS. 49ers @ Seahawks 8pm Saturday on FOX. Texans @ Patriots 3pm Sunday on ESPN and ABC. Rams @ Bears 630pm on NBC. All times eastern US.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 06/01/2026

thank you so much, Experian IdentityWorks®. hope things are going great over there.

Email from Experian letting me know that my IdentityWorks subscription expires in 30 days. The body reads “Dear Michael, Your Experian IdentityWorks subscription will expire in 5 days.”

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 26/12/2025

might be my cue to stop paying for Medium

Medium article titled “Nvidia’s CEO Just Dropped a Hard Truth: “Smart” Is About to Become Worthless.” The subtitle reads “When AI turns IQ into a commodity, only one human…”

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 13/12/2025

my personal favorite part of the game. i still remember me and Dad trying out Dragon NaturallySpeaking on his PC back in the late 90s. a quarter century later, Siri still makes an inexcusable number of mistakes in voice texts with friends. not sure what we're doing anymore.

Screenshot from the Woe Industries game "You Have Billions Invested in Generative AI". It reads: "You realize that he cannot get his phone's voice transcription software to work. ...how many years ago was that technology released? ...is anyone in the industry even still trying to fix it?"

Software box for Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred. A woman wearing a headset sitting in front of a PC is reading from a document, presumably using this software to transcribe it into text.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 05/11/2025

such a sick election night. virtue isn't dead. we will win. they will lose.

Zidane from Final Fantasy IX's opening cutscene. He's staring intensely over a cliff under a grey sky. Text overlay on the image reads "Virtue. You don't need a reason to help people."

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 04/09/2025

Hollow Knight: Silksong is already in the top 15 for active players on Steam despite all the store crashes. How high can it go...?

Top 15 Most Played Games from steamdb.info. Hollow Knight: Silksong is already #14 on the list with 89,646 players in-game.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 27/07/2025

Richmond power grid (maybe all of Virginia?) is embarrassing this summer. Third time we’ve had a sustained outage from a short storm. 36k out again in Henrico, plus a bunch more downtown. C’mon Dominion. Very clear we’re not ready for a climate-changed world.

HENRICO

Number of Projects: 135
Customers Out: 36,718
Customers Served: 161,658

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 26/05/2025

good day to rip a wall open and put some Ethernet in

Closeup of me holding one end of a cat 6a network port in-progress. The blue, green, orange, and brown wires are set, but they still need to be punched down and installed into a wall plate.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 30/04/2025

that’s fine but I’m still going to all of @benstarr.bsky.social‘s panels with a final fantasy shirt and a dream. “Fly Ambrosia…”

Please Note: This will be a Natural Six signing session only, it's free, and they’re even bringing the posters for you!

This does mean that members won’t be doing individual signings of items like game cases, books, or posters from other games or productions they’ve been featured in. Thanks for understanding.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 27/04/2025

Just finished Careless People. Incredible insight into all the ways elites will raze the earth for profits. About halfway through you can already draw a pretty straight line from Zuck 10 years ago to his recent “mental illness” revisions to the hate speech guidelines. A must-read. Thanks Sarah.

The cover of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. A Facebook-shade blue mousepad has a single shark fin sticking out of the top left corner, as if the mousepad were the ocean. The bottom right corner of the mousepad says “A MEMOIR”.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 24/04/2025

got in the Best Buy line for a Switch 2...we shall pray 🙏🏻

020

Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 14/04/2025

what a month for the stock market huh

One month chart from my investment account. The line showing daily gains and losses resembles the silhouette of a cat, so I’ve drawn in the rest of the cat with beige fur, red eyes/mouth and pink ears/paw beans.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 29/03/2025

oracle of seasons playthrough is long overdue. zelda time

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 28/03/2025

went to go find the WSJ Trump tariff article on Apple News and got this juxtaposition…cinema

An Apple News search for “not to raise prices”. The first result is the Wall Street Journal article “Trump Warned U.S. Automakers Not to Raise Prices in Response to Tariffs.” The second article is from Reuters 17 hours earlier, with the headline “Valero to raise prices as a result of Trump’s 25% tariffs on car imports.”

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 23/03/2025

seems like they have moved UConn to the top of the odds list to attract more bettors LOL people starting to believe again…

NCAA March Madness champion odds. Connecticut +6500, Florida +420, then the other teams listed in increasing odds order.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

bottom half of the west region bracket for March Madness:

6 Missouri vs. 11 Drake, 3 Texas Tech vs. 14 UNCW, 7 Kansas vs. 10 Arkansas, 2 St. John’s vs. 15 Omaha

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

top half of the west region bracket for March Madness (go Huskies):

1 Florida vs. 16 Norfolk State, 8 UCONN vs. 9 Oklahoma, 5 Memphis vs. 12 Colorado State, 4 Maryland vs. 13 Grand Canyon

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

bottom half of the midwest region bracket for March Madness:

6 Illinois vs. 11 Texas/Xavier, 3 Kentucky vs. 14 Troy, 7 UCLA vs. 10 Utah State, 2 Tennessee vs. 15 Wofford

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

top half of the midwest region bracket for March Madness:

1 Houston vs. 16 SIU Edwardsville, 8 Gonzaga vs. 9 Georgia, 5 Clemson vs. 12 McNeese, 4 Purdue vs. 13 High Point

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

bottom half of the east region bracket for March Madness:

6 BYU vs. 11 VCU, 3 Wisconsin vs. 14 Montana, 7 Saint Mary’s vs. 10 Vanderbilt, 2 Alabama vs. 15 Robert Morris

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

top half of the east region bracket for March Madness:

1 Duke vs. 16 American/Mount Saint Mary’s, 8 Mississippi State vs. 9 Baylor, 5 Oregon vs. 12 Liberty, 4 Arizona vs. 13 Akron

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

bottom half of the south region bracket for March Madness:

6 Ole Miss vs. 11 SDSU/UNC, 3 Iowa State vs. 14 Lipscomb, 7 Marquette vs. 10 New Mexico, 2 Michigan State vs. 15 Bryant

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 16/03/2025

really thought this was gonna be me vs. @flourishordie.bsky.social 🫡 BEAT CREIGHTON

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 21/01/2025

Bitbucket is not just down…it’s “hard down”. 🤨

Update - We are investigating an issue with saturated Bitbucket database that impacts all Bitbucket operations. We will provide more details within the next hour.
Jan 21, 2025 - 17:07 UTC

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 12/01/2025

mentally ill virtue signaling complete. ✌🏻 meta.

Emails confirming that my Facebook and Instagram accounts are scheduled for deletion. Only someone truly mentally ill would virtue signal like this.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 08/01/2025

Backing up Instagram account and they sent…a Download button that isn’t even a link. No href lol. Incredible stuff from Billion Dollar Company Meta.

Here is the file you requested with the information about your account tarpstone.
This link will only work for 4 days after we send it.
Because it may contain personal information, be sure to keep the link private and only download the file to your own computer.
If you requested your information in an HTML format, you'll be able to navigate your files more easily by opening the index.html file first.

The preceding text is followed by a blue Download information button that is not clickable.

HTML a tag for the button with no href property.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 17/11/2024

a camel looked into my soul today at the Metro Richmond Zoo 🐫

A distinguished camel staring directly into the camera lens during a sunny afternoon at the Metro Richmond Zoo

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 12/11/2024

The Verizon FiOS outage might only be affecting IPv4. IPv6 sites seem to be loading for us here in Richmond. Maybe they finally ran out of v4 addresses 😎

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 10/11/2024

Here’s the awful Google AI incorrectly telling me that I can turn off the awful Apple AI smart reply feature by disabling an entirely different Apple AI feature. Feeling awfully job secure today. We are mad for burning the planet just for this.

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 31/10/2024

Zoom meeting (…for Pumpkin Hill…)

I know that it’s here, I sense it in my feet…

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Mike Tarpey @tarpey.io · 24/07/2023

help I can't turn it off #FF16

Screenshot of Apple Music MiniPlayer showing the Final Fantasy XVI album art and upcoming songs that I plan on listening to for the next 3874901243 hours

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